Traditionalist: Living in the Real World

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

We are recording on Sunday, October 17th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star of the show, is, of course, Victor Davis-Hansen, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and best-selling New York Times best-selling author of the new book, The Dying Citizen.

We encourage our listeners to go out, buy it, learn, spread the word about what is a truly important book.

On today's episode of The Traditionalist, of course, we have a lot of things to discuss, and two of them will be about cabinet secretaries in the Biden administration, Pete Boutigej and Attorney General Garland.

Let's get to them right after this important message.

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We're back with the traditionalist.

The Victor Davis Hansen Show has three weekly podcasts: the traditionalist and the classicist, two of which I'm very honored to host.

And then there's the great Sammy Wink, who hosts the Culturalist.

We hope you listen to all of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show podcasts.

Victor, my friend, it's been a long time since we've been able to talk about political things, which we do under the traditionalist.

We were pinch-hitting last week.

Dan Mahoney did some great interviews with you about the dying citizen.

You've been on the road a lot lately with the new book.

Congratulations for how well it's been received and purchased, despite the best efforts of some of the industry to make it a difficult task to buy your book.

But, you know, it's difficult for people to buy a lot of things today.

There are lots of container ships floating out on our coasts, which itself is troubling, Victor, I guess.

It's so much of what Americans consume is produced overseas.

But one of the people who would be responsible for transportation and logistics and supply lines and this sort is the Transportation Secretary, Pete Budigesh, who was kind of in absentia.

Not kind of, he really was.

He's been away on paternity leave during this kind of crisis in America.

Victor, what do you have to say about Secretary Boutigej?

Well,

I'm not going to single him out for being unqualified because that is...

that's representative of cabinet selections.

Usually they're done on political grounds.

Either they're really big

who, you know, have packs behind them that gave a lot of money to a candidate, or they were rival candidates themselves who bowed out mysteriously at an opportune time for the eventual nominee, and then they were rewarded with a cabinet.

I have no problem.

That's the way it works.

But in his case, I can't find any evidence of any administrative ability ever.

He was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, which is basically synonymous with what?

Notre Dame University, a liberal university.

He got bikes, public bikes put in there.

Yeah, and he had a terrible crime rate.

And the African-American community wanted protection from criminals in the inner city.

And of course, that was contrary to the logic of the elite academic that was his base of support.

And then he ran for president.

And it ran for president because he was supposedly glib.

He spoke some languages.

He was gay, and he went to Afghanistan and came back, basically.

I mean, I appraise his service, but that was it.

So then, when he bowed out, because people discovered very quickly that although he looked pretty good as a candidate in the sense of his resume, he was the most insufferable, sanctimonious, self-righteous skull we'd ever seen.

He would lecture people about their evangelical prejudice, their superstitious religion, their backward ideas, but all in an elevated academies tone.

And so we thought we were done with him.

And then he reappeared as transportation and the media loved him.

So he wrote a bike to work, which I think is kind of strange because it tells you the transportation secretary has not got an old beat up pickup and driving 20 miles with lumber in the back to go to work and has to get affordable gas.

But he didn't live in that world of the real world.

And then he became transportation.

All we've heard of him is a little mouse squeaks here and there about climate change and all of that stuff.

And then we had this crisis.

And that is basically we had a year of pin up demand.

And then when the vaccinations were somewhat effective in preventing serious COVID and people got confident and they went out, the government under Trump had given over a trillion dollars, then two more trillion under Biden, and then the infrastructure billed down.

And we flooded the zone with funny money and people had a lot to spend.

And at the same time, we told producers, no, we're going to put you out of business if you produce gas and oil, cancel pipelines, cancel ANWAR, cancel new federal losing.

He didn't say a thing as we started to lose two and a half million barrels of daily production.

Gas started to spike, okay?

And then we started subsidizing people with very generous supplements to stay home.

And so, longshoremen, long-term truckers, container operators, everywhere from Savannah, Georgia to Port of LA were not unloading and things.

And where was he during this crisis?

Well, he was home with his quote-unquote husband and their two children.

I guess they had a surrogate mother, birth them.

And

he took, I mean, think about that, two months.

at the point man for the biggest disaster in supplies and transportation in our lifetime.

The first time in my memory, you can go into any store and see whole swaths of the shells bear.

And he's home, and his partner is not working, apparently, and he's off for two months.

Okay, maternity leave.

But you know what?

That's a government phenomenon usually,

because I talk to people at restaurants.

I was talking to a person in the Midwest at a restaurant in September, and

she looked like she was about ready ready to deliver.

And I said, oh, congratulations.

She said, I don't know if I'm going to have a baby today.

I mean, she didn't take off at one day.

And people in the working classes don't have that prerogative.

And yet, here's this guy who's asleep at the wheel, and

he won't respond.

Or when he responds, there's no answers.

And now we

that

the Port of LA, which is basically as far as consumer goods for this indebted, in hockey, unproductive country we have now that imports all the stuff from China.

It's the gateway to China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, for their stuff to come in here.

It's only working two shifts.

So you take, you fly down to LA and you go over this thing at Port of Los Angeles near Long Beach, and it just, it.

It looks like a domino board from the sky, just full of containers.

You look out on the horizon.

There's ships stacked up.

And Pete Buttigig is on, you know, maternity leave or paternity leave.

And he can say, oh, what he wants, but how hard is it to say to the Port of LA people, come here, what do you need to make this thing work 24 hours?

You need more truckers?

You need more whatever.

We're going to get it done.

And go to Newsome and say, do not extend $600 supplemental weekly payments for people.

Get them out working and do what you have to do.

But he didn't do any of that.

And then he did say some things that were very important, I thought, as a revelation of his real character.

He said, well, it's basically a problem of people like myself.

I'm a last-minute shopper.

But some people are not last-minute shoppers.

So they like to get their presence ahead.

Ha ha ha.

So for you, basically the message was for you anal retentive.

passive aggressive psychologically impaired people who do your shopping right now, you're not going to find it.

But maybe the night before Christmas, the shelves will suddenly be stocked.

If you give me, you know, another two months, that was the message.

And so it was like sort of, you know, Jim Saki and Tim Clain's message that inflation is basically a high-end problem.

That, you know, when I filled up two days ago and it was $4.80 a gallon, that was...

that was because I'm an elite.

And the guy next to me in a torn up old diesel pickup that barely ran.

That wasn't his problem.

It was only my problem because I'm an elite.

Okay, Victor, let's talk about another cabinet secretary who's been much in the news, and that is Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, with his infamous memo that has mobilized the FBI against parents who have the nerve to come out to public meetings in this representative democracy to talk to the people who represent them and to express their anger or express whatever they want to express about what their children are being taught.

Garland happens to have a son-in-law who is getting very rich off the critical race theory business, and his name is Zan Tanner.

He runs a company called Panorama Education.

Victor, there's nothing in federal law that entitles the FBI to become involved in these matters.

I think that's, you know, of course, that's not unimportant, but just the arrogance of our president instructing garland to do this and garland doing this in what is a country that has a first amendment i find shocking we've this has happened a couple of weeks ago but this is our first opportunity to hear from you talk about this so victor would you give us your opinion on this infamous garland memo garland to paraphrase Eric Colder is Biden's wingman.

And everybody criticized Bill Barr, but Bill Barr clashed with Trump all the time, for good or bad.

And the right got angry at him.

I remember he was persona non grata because he did not go along with a lot of the stuff Trump wanted to do.

Okay.

And then we were told that he was not independent.

Merrick Garland is a wingman to Joe Biden.

I shouldn't say to Joe Biden, to the Biden conglomerate.

I don't know who that is, the Obamas or Rod Klaim, Mond Klaim, whoever they are, that

pulling the strings of the Biden marionette.

But he's not independent.

It's very ironic, as I said, because we were told that Bill Barr was not in.

He was far more independent, Barr was, than either Eric Holder or Merrick Garland.

Number one, number two, very quickly, this is not that veneer that we saw a few years ago, that he was unfairly robbed of the Supreme Court.

He was a moderate.

He was always a hardcore leftist.

That's fine.

But it kind of shatters the idea that the Democrats were putting up under the last year of Obama this moderate judge, and the conservatives who had the prerogative to stop that nomination exercise it because they felt that he would be a hardcore leftist operative, which he is.

And third,

it reminds everybody in the audience that the Democratic Party is not only now the party of the very wealthy and the elite, it's also the party of the intelligence, investigative, industrial, and military complex, a little expansion on Dwight Eisenhower's warning.

In other words, they love the FBI.

They love military federal troops in the street, as we saw after January 6th.

They love John Brennan's CIA.

They love the National Security Agency because there's no give and take.

It's chain of command and you can get social change enacted.

So when he's going to sick the FBI, all he has to do is get the right nomenclature now, Jack.

All you need is the right vocabulary.

So when you have a bunch of moms out there and dads, and they're protesting that somebody's daughter was raped by a quote unquote transgendered female who was actually a male,

or they don't like to be told when their children come home that the children cried and say, I was called a racist.

I didn't do anything wrong.

Did you know that, mommy?

We're all horrible people.

Or anything like that.

And they protest, then you call them domestic terrorists.

You don't call Antifa domestic terrorists.

You, you're Kamala Harris, you bail them out.

But if you're exercising your constitutional rights, you're domestic terrorism, and you're engaged in not First Amendment, but hate speech.

And when you get that vocabulary down, then it's an existential threat, and you get the FBI, and that's supposed to intimidate people.

And I would imagine that from now on, there's going to be one or two FBI

informants, and every single school board protest in a major city.

Yeah, maybe even trying to instigate violence.

Well, we saw that with what?

The kidnapping of the

supposed kidnapping

plot of the Michigan governor when it looks like there were more FBI informants involved than actual nutty kidnappers.

By the way, Victor, along the lines of some of the categorization of free speech, we have Terry McAuliffe, who's trying to become governor again of Virginia.

As of today, he seems to be behind in some polls, but he's been on national television or the cable shows calling the parents at these school meetings that CRT, their complaints against CRT, this is really a racist dog whistle.

He could say it all he wants.

I think it's being reflected in the polls, how the people are fed up.

And after a year and a half of being locked down and shut out, or public boards conducting their business via zoom and giving no real outlet to people that folks are finally taking matters into their own hands victor let's move on and talk about david chappelle a comedian now i have seen his uh new special it's on netflix it's gotten a tremendous amount of attention publicity it's been attacked he's been attacked

He really takes on cancel culture in this particular show.

It's about an hour long.

I've seen it twice.

I think it's very, very funny.

I probably have to go to confession for watching it because I laughed at things I probably shouldn't have laughed at.

But he seems to me not to have backed down some of his greater public critics over the years, including the transgender community.

Anyway, Victor, I don't know that you've seen it in its entirety.

I assume you've seen some clips of this, but we have some pushback here from a prominent comedian, which is part of American culture, that's just said,

stop it.

Do you have any thoughts about this little moment in America's culture?

Yes, he's part, first of all, if you put him in the context, he's part of people on the left, each according to their own discipline, that understand where the trajectory of this woke fascism eventually leads, i.e., to the end of themselves.

So he's saying, Jerry Seinfeld's another one, that you can't have comedy when you have censors that try to contextualize everything in terms of race and class, not class so much, but gender.

And you can't do it when you put whole swaths of the stuff of comedy.

You read Aristophanes' plays.

I mean, today, the 11 comedies, they're all about making fun of Spartans or Thebans.

or women or men, etc.

You take that off and you have no comedy, basically.

Forget about the word word hate speech.

So that's what he's saying.

And he's one with Bill Maher.

Bill Maher has said, if this thing continues, people like myself will be out of business because you can't speak freely.

And you'll have to speak to these little nerdy people that come out of the university that live in their basements, basically, and have no real life other than making life miserable for everybody who has fun.

So Larry Summers comes back and says, I mean, he's about as liberal economist as you can get.

And he says to Yellen and to the Obama team and the, excuse me, the, well, the Obama team.

I think the Obama team is playing a very large role in the Biden White House.

But he's saying if you keep printing $2 trillion, $3 trillion,

and this continues, you're going to destroy the United States currency.

You're going to get rampant inflation.

And then you have, you know, senators like Menendez and Democratic senators said Afghanistan was not a logistical success.

It's a failure.

It's a failure.

It's been very grievous.

And then you get people, Democrats, who say, you know what?

You better call Saudi Arabia up or Joe, you better go talk to those frackers because we cannot run in 2024 on three, four, five dollar a gallon gas.

We just can't do it.

He's part of a movement that's saying woke in the academic lounge when translated into the real world is destroying things.

It's toxic.

It destroys things.

It destroys the military.

It destroys NASA.

It's destroyed everything we talked about today.

That's number one.

And number two, he's saying to the censors, I don't care.

And that's sort of like the guy at Tineman Square stood in front of the tank

or Joseph Welch when McCarthy went after him.

He just said, have you no decency, sir?

So these are moments

when somebody stands up to the mob and says,

go ahead and do what you want.

It's not going to affect me.

It's going to be very interesting to see how successful he is because now we're into what they call, the left calls intersectionality, right?

So you have all of these hierarchies of oppressed.

peoples and victimized peoples, the transgendered, the gay, the feminist, the minorities, and they all have different agendas.

Well, he is a black man being attacked largely by white men and women because he's insensitive to 0.2% of the population, transgendered people.

So they say.

And yet he's not a Tom Soule

or he's not,

you know, a Ben Carson or somebody who's a black conservative.

Shelby Steele.

So he's not quite fair game.

He's one of them politically.

And so now they're trying to scramble out.

They're going to have to call in a

oppressed, marginalized person calculator and get out his calculator and say, hmm, one point for this, one point for this, one point for this, run it through the data scrambler to see whether his oppressors have more marginalized points than he does.

And my view of all this is that

basically

Two things run the marginalized people scrambler.

One is if you sound conservative, you give up a lot of points no matter what your race race or gender.

You saw that with Barry Weiss.

You're an apostate.

And then number two,

the transgender people are the marginalized person of the last five years.

So they are at the top of the hierarchy now.

I think they're ahead of Native Americans, Latinos, blacks, they're ahead of feminists, they're ahead of gay people.

So it's going to be very hard because although he's a black man and he's liberal, he's also sounding conservative

and he's attacking what they, I don't think he is attacking them, but they consider he's attacking transgender people by treating transgender people as everybody else.

Fair game.

So what?

I thought they were supposed to be tough.

I thought the whole idea was marginalized people are tough.

They've endured stuff.

We can take anything and they're not hot house plants with the first suggestion of criticism.

Well,

it seems maybe they are.

So Victor, we're going to talk about a few other matters in in today's edition of the Traditionalist.

We'll talk about China threatening Taiwan.

Then we'll do a polyglot of some issues, political issues, Manchin versus Sanders, Kamala Harris, and comprehensively, how you think this is casting the Democrats as a political party up for election.

There are a number of important elections coming up in the next couple of weeks, local and on a few states, but then as pertains to 2022.

but then also let's talk about some of the vaccine madness that's going going on first though china china has threatened taiwan real shows of force what do you make of it what are your thoughts of how america should be responding to red china's threats against taiwan here's china's dilemma they've got 1.4 billion people.

They've got a sophisticated military

and they've got this, what will soon be probably the largest economy.

And they're looking at little Taiwan with 30-something million right across the strait, very sophisticated economy, big chip maker, and integrated to somewhat with the Red Chinese, if I could use that term, economy.

But they don't like it because it's a megaphone for democracy.

And they've created a new culture the last 30 years of anti-communism and anti-communist China.

And there's more solidarity than there ever has been with Taiwan.

Okay, so China's looking at Taiwan and they're thinking, how do we get rid of these people?

Do we isolate them?

Do we embargo them?

Do we sanction them?

Or do we put our guys?

They've tried all of that.

They put their guys inside China, you know, fake Taiwanese nationalists, fake this, they've tried cyber, they've done everything, and it's still there.

So then they've said to themselves, well, let's go bully Australia, let's go bully South Korea, Let's go bully the Philippines and Japan.

And they've been very successful at it, they thought.

But then, you know, Trump came along and said, China is an existential threat.

We're going to get tough.

Hey, you guys, let's band together.

So they were very angry about that.

And then Trump started just opening the gates of arms sales to Taiwan.

And now, after Afghanistan and after these disasters that are happening, the Chinese leadership is in flux.

They're saying, wait a minute, we may never get somebody who's cognitively challenged again as president of the United States.

We may never get a nutty chairman of the Joint Chiefs who calls us to warn us if he'd ever take aggressive action against us or our interests.

We've never seen this before.

So they're flooding the zone and sending assets by air and sea into spaces that are considered, if not Taiwanese sovereign territory, at least areas that are neutralized and you're not supposed to do that.

And they're probing.

And they also know

that if the United States were to be muscular and send more aid to Taiwan, and if Japan and Australia and South Korea and the United States were to hold firm, that it's almost impossible without nuclear weapons to take Taiwan back.

It would be a bloodbath if they tried to go across that strait.

So basically what they're doing now is they are going to do a maximum pressure.

They're going to go into their airspace.

They're going to go into their maritime waters.

They're going to try to disrupt them through cyber attacks, propaganda.

They're going to try to fund opposition groups.

They're going to try to pressure the Japanese, the Australians.

They're going to pressure the South Koreans.

They're going to pressure us.

And we'll see if they can crack Taiwan.

I don't think they can crack Taiwan, but Joe Biden has given them an opening.

And they feel that they're never going to get an opening like that.

They're never going to get a chairman of the Joint Chiefs like Mark Milley again.

And whether that's fair to him or not, it doesn't really matter because that's their perception and he knows it.

Let's get your take on the state of U.S.

partisan politics right now.

And after that, we'll wrap up the traditionalists with some vaccine talk.

So you have Bernie Sanders writing in a West Virginia newspaper, trying to embarrass Joe Manchin.

And Manchin shoots back, and I'm like, mind your own business, you socialist.

A strange thing, but strange for normal people, but I don't think we're that surprised.

Kamala Harris concocts some YouTube special on space exploration with kids.

It's supposed to seem natural.

These must be local school kids that our vice president has met with.

And no, they are actors, they're child actors who were, in fact, auditioned and gotten by a Canadian company called Sinking Ship Entertainment.

We have, of course, inflation and other madness happening.

We have a scowling Joe Biden.

I'm sure you saw the video the other day where he was kind of a menacing bending forward talk about how there are less or fewer democracies in the world.

There's one more dictatorship in the world, thanks to Joe.

You mentioned earlier some of these Virginia insanities, a parent who wanted to talk to a school board because his daughter had been sodomized by a transgender kid in in a bathroom and prevented.

We have McAuliffe's weirdnesses about saying parents shouldn't be involved in their kids' education.

A whole host of one story after.

God, I got exhausted.

I got exhausted just hearing you say all that.

You know, well, I'm leaving the list, leaving a lot off the list, but Victor, you know, if I was a Democratic strategist, I'd be deeply worried about the upcoming elections in a few states with a lot of municipal elections across the country, a lot of Board of Education elections happening.

So I'd be worried and particularly worried for 2022.

But that's my take.

Richter, what's your sense of the standing of American politics here?

You know, I think that there are a few sane people in the Democratic Party, Doug Schoen or these pollsters.

Zogby had a poll today, yesterday, 36%, he's a liberal, 36% approval of Joe Biden.

When you get to 36, what that basically means is

that anybody in the Congress, senator or House member, unless they've been there so long and they have so much money and they have a plus 10 district, state or congressional district, they're not going to win because they either have to divorce themselves from the issues or the person.

So Terry McAuliffe, just you mentioned him, he was in now is a purple state.

He's got all these federal employees.

It's transitioning liberal.

He could lose that because of Joe Biden.

So he can't really come out and support any of these things as they all have less than 50%

support.

So when you mention this litany on the border, Afghanistan, critical race, gas, inflation, the question is, why are they doing it?

Why, why, why are they doing it?

And I wrote about this, there has to be one of three.

explanations for the madness.

And it's like James Buchanan's presidency or jimmy carter on steroids so it has to be one of the three and they're not mutually exclusive one

one is that they're incompetent and they really did believe that wind and solar could take up the slack or they really did believe that when when they got out of afghanistan it would be orderly and transitionary and the taliban would pat them on the back and da da da or they really did believe when you call a white person a racist ad nalcium that he would get down on his hands and knees and say, please, please, I'm not a racist.

My great-great-grandfather was, but I'm not.

They really did believe that, that it wouldn't cause.

Or when you let somebody loot and steal, they'll say, you know, he really needed that money.

And so it's not a crime.

They could be that stupid.

Okay.

Or two,

they're nihilists.

They believe in anarchy.

They believe in chaos.

They just feel like every time the Democratic Party came into power and had a socialist agenda, whether it was the Great Depression or the great society that followed the turmoil after the assassination of JFK, or now after that terrible 2020 year, that chaos is what they need.

It's what Gavin Newsom said, you know, we're locked down.

Now is a chance for progressive capitalism.

Or Hillary said, we're locked down.

Now is a chance for single-payer health.

Or Rahm Emmanuel in 2008, now is a chance never to let a serious crisis go to waste so they feel that the more turmoil and confusion and mandates and this then they can take away your first amendment why they can use the

or

they don't see this jack

you and i see it our listeners see it america sees it at least according to mr zogby only 36% of the country either doesn't see it or likes it.

And what I mean by is

we see chaos of two million people entering illegally the united states without vaccinations at a time when federal employees or soldiers will be fired without vaccinations they're poor they're not going to be assimilated rapidly or integrated they're going to need this state and they think this is really good We're going to distribute these 2 million a year and key congressional districts.

We'll bust them all around.

We flip California.

We flip Nevada.

We have flipped Colorado.

We have flipped New Mexico.

Mexico, we have basically almost flipped Georgia, Virginia, and we're going to bring these guys and flip more.

So what's the problem?

It's just, you know, we broke a few eggs on the way to an omelette or Afghanistan.

Hey, we're out of Afghanistan.

And the Taliban are indigenous people and they have their country back.

It was a win-win situation.

And you know what?

Stephen Chu said that we wouldn't get climate change relief until gasoline got $9 a gallon.

Well, we're half there now.

In California, we're five.

Go to it.

The higher, the better.

And Gavin Newsom says, I will trump that.

I'll trump the gas.

I will ban, you know, chainsaws and lawnmowers.

Or, you know, when they see looting and they see Soros

district attorneys and prosecuting attorneys in the major cities not indicting people for crimes or defunding police, they say, this is wonderful.

They say things to the effect, Jack, hey, did a wealthy person ever go in in and steal $100 worth of pharmaceutical goods?

No, but wealthy people made the laws.

It says you can't do that.

So why did they make the laws?

Well, they made the laws because it didn't apply to them.

Only people in need do that.

So these law, according to critical legal theory, is a construct.

It's wealthy people make laws outlawing stuff they don't do.

So therefore, if you go, Lou, what's wrong with that?

It's redistributing, you know, property.

I'm not being facetious.

This is Camilla Harris bailing people out that you reference.

This is Nicole Hannah-Jones, the architect of 1619, saying property is not a crime when you destroy it or loot it or take it.

And this is the videos that we talked about looting.

So the third alternative is not chaos or not incompetence, but they see success, that all the things that are polling low.

And the only reason they're pulling low is that we're stupid and we don't appreciate what they're doing.

So somebody is saying to the Democratic Party, few,

listen, you guys, you think it's success, but you're in a blank, blank, blank echo chamber, a vacuum.

You have no understanding that people don't like that.

They don't like the chaos.

They don't like the incompetence.

And this is not a success.

You're a little socialist bubble.

And then they're telling them,

Well, even if everything he says is true, we've got another year and we got a lot more appointments and we got a lot more agendas and we still control the Congress.

And we may, if we get rid of this SOB mansion or blackmail him or do something to him or pressure him, and he goes along with the filibuster end,

man, we can get 15 justices on the Supreme Court.

We can get rid of the Electoral College if we have to by the National Voters Compact.

We can get rid of 50 states.

We'll have 52 states.

We can do a lot of stuff still and cause a lot of good damage.

So that's where we are politically.

And I don't know how long that these guys are going to be so deluded because I think it's mostly the third option.

Listening to Jen Sackey and the people in the left-wing commentary business, they do think Biden is enormously successful.

And you read things that he did a lot more than Barack Obama has ever done.

And he's very adept and he's doing a great job.

It's just that he's not being properly appreciated.

And if that's true, there's a good chance that that he'll go down to 34, 32, and he will destroy the Democratic Party in the midterm election.

Yeah, while destroying America in the process.

If we can, yeah, it's like, I don't know.

I've used chemotherapy about Trump destroying the deep state, but to get rid of this crazy socialism that's destroying us, are you willing to let them destroy America for another two years or a year?

And it'll be a close call how well we can rebound if we can get rid of these people and vote them out of office well victor another way folks are pushing back at what they consider oppression or maybe a dictation of violation of their liberties has to do with vaccinations within the last week there have been a tremendous amount of flight cancellations particularly by southwest airlines whose pilots protested and I think this happened with some other airlines they protested the vaccine mandates.

Now, Southwest Airline denies that and has a bunch of excuses, but I know, and I assume you know, people who are pilots who are saying this is exactly why we did it.

Then we have some other stories here.

California workers, it seems like 40% of California workers have not gotten the vaccine.

We see stories about various police departments, particularly like Seattle.

cops are just not doing it and probably are in the are going to be fired.

Two more things to lump into this vaccine polyglot.

We have,

oh, Anthony Fauci

giving us permission to maybe celebrate Christmas with our family members and loved ones if we got a dose.

I saw something today or yesterday,

another Monday morning quarterbacking.

Oh, you know what?

Maybe we should have had the Johnson Johnson vaccine.

Maybe should have been two shots.

instead of one.

So Victor, you know, it just seems America is not buying the wisdom, alleged wisdom of our leaders on this issue anymore, and they're finding ways to push back.

So this is a big vaccine ball, do something with it.

You know, I think there's a subtext that no one's talking about, and that is there's probably, according to the CDC and private university studies and public university studies, there's probably about 100 million people who have had COVID.

And I know a large number of them has been vaccinated, but we know maybe even a larger number has not been vaccinated.

California alone, I think we have somewhere nearing 5 million known cases.

And according to this two and a half to three times rule, we probably have 15 million people who have had COVID.

Probably only 5 million have been vaccinated.

So we have another 10 million people.

What I'm getting at is there's a large number of people in these groups in the federal workforce.

in healthcare workers, in the military that have suffered through COVID.

And while the science is still still unsettled, and I'm speaking to somebody who had two Moderna vaccinations and urges everybody to put up with the side effects because it, you know, it seems to prevent the spread of COVID.

We don't know quite yet what the dangers of the vaccination are versus the dangers of so-called long COVID, et cetera.

Nevertheless, there's a lot of people who are making a determination based on some solid science that they having gotten COVID are better protected than people like myself.

And so they are saying, I'm not going to get this shot.

A, I don't need it.

And B, because I have antibodies, it might even give a greater chance of side effects.

So we're going after people and demonizing them if on the premise that they're unscientific when they may be more scientific than the people going after them, which comes to the conclusion, why don't we just say to people, you have a vaccination certificate or you have an antibody?

Now, we know that the antibody test is not necessarily an accurate predicator of absolute immunity but as we've discovered we lied about the vaccinations or at least we were ill-informed they're not a reliable protection from crossover infection so all we'd have to do jack is just say that you're in the military you're a pilot you're a frontline worker just show us if you have antibodies or not and you know what would happen i'm talking about a political now because you asked this in a political context.

It would take the steam out of the protest because I think half of the people who are refusing to be vaccinated have had COVID.

And so then you're getting down to a smaller group who says, I haven't had COVID and I haven't been vaccinated and screw you.

And in political terms, then the forces of this mandatory vaccination movement would have a lot more leverage.

But when you go after people who have had COVID and you do it from the presumption that you have the superior science and you may not, then you're never going to do it.

You're never going to win.

They're going to be such massive resistance with 100 million people, a third of the country, if some of them are not overlapping with BACS's, quarter of California, it's not going to work.

And so that's what we're seeing.

We're going to see mass resistance.

And then these companies are going to have to say to themselves, they're going to go to Joe Biden and say, there are no workers.

You know, you've either dosed people with so much money that they're in a coma at home, watching TV as a check, waiting by the mailbox every day for another check, or they've walked off the job and they're not going to go back and it's going to get worse.

And you yourself said you were never going to have a mandate.

That's one issue.

The other issue is it's this incrementalism that's everybody's scared about.

This, the whole quarantine was to flatten the curve for two or three weeks.

That's out the window.

It became permanent.

And then the Moderna and the Pfizer was said, this is what we were told.

I went back and looked at it this week.

Basically, the message that the government gave the agencies, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, all of them was, don't worry about anybody else.

If you get the vaccination, you are in a capsule of prophylaxis.

In other words, if there's some Yahoo

from

Oklahoma City who hangs out at Target or Walmart and he's not vaxed and you bump into him, that's his problem.

All of his little germ bullets that he shoots at you, they'll bounce off at you.

You're in power.

That's the message we got.

And then suddenly, when we thought COVID was over with, this variant came and they told us, well, don't worry, it won't get the vax.

And then it started to infect a lot of vaxed people, but not as severely as it otherwise might have had they not been vaxed.

But the point I'm giving is that they have completely lost their credibility.

and in lieu of explication and greater studies and more reliance on actual science they're doubling down on I'm the man and you're the serf I'm the gatekeeper you're the guy trying to crash in I'm the head of the manor you're the peasant so you listen and they have no credibility not after a year and a half of lying I wish they had more credibility.

And then you can see where it's going.

So at UC Berkeley right now, they're going to mandate a vaccination for what?

COVID?

Not just COVID, but the flu.

We know that on a very, very good year,

the range is 35 to 65% efficacy, but on a very good year, we get 45 to 50% protection against the flu.

So you're going to go and make every student mandatorily get vaccinated for the flu with a vaccination.

of which you know if you're very lucky, half of them are going to be worthless or not of very much utility.

So why are you doing that?

And a lot of people are saying it's an exercise in government power to be able to tell people

that, you know, we have the ability to force you to take a medical

protocol that you may not want.

And if we can do that to you, we can do that, anything to you.

Right.

Can you imagine anything more thrilling than that?

Than when you have this desire for power to tell people what to do?

You know what I was thinking?

I was thinking the other day, about three years ago, they had this new thing come in.

You remember called the senior flu shot?

Yeah.

And they packed it with so many

gain of function, you know,

adjuvants and everything to make the virus spread through your body.

Or guys like me, 68, supposedly, are not very good in terms of immune.

Well, I got this thing, six times more power, and I got sick as a dog.

I have an immune, I have an immune, I mean, my white blood cell went down from, I think, down to three.

everybody was concerned with the doctor what happened to you and you're very ill and i have an immune problem anyway and i've only had it happen another time when i got the second 100 milligram dose of moderna okay

so we have 100 milligrams of moderna 100 milligrams of moderna second time and now they're making these shots out where they combine them with the the flu shot and the Moderna shot.

And they haven't really come out and made the small, I don't think.

And I don't, I'm not a doctor or a scientific person, but from my understanding is if you are over 65 and you go to your doctor or pharmacy and say, I want another Moderna shot as a booster, they don't have the little 50 milligram reduced booster shot.

They give you the whole thing, a regular Moderna as a booster.

And then you can either buy one that has also a flu vaccination tapped into it or get a separate flu shot the same day.

But you talk to some of these guys that had both, you know, and they're pretty wiped out.

So the idea that with all this worry, whether it's grounded or not, superstitious or scientific, side effects, real or exaggerated, you're going to double down and you're going to make people vaccinated.

And then you're going to come out with these super duper high potency boosters with same day vaccination for flu.

I'm thinking, well, why not just say, you also got to have the,

I don't know, the shingles vax and the pneumonia vax.

Everybody I know that's had the shingles or the pneumonia has had some pretty bad side effects, but throw them in there too.

You know, it reminds me when I was in Greece, I wanted to go to Egypt and I went to a Greek clinic and they said, you know, we want you to have plague and yellow fever and typhus and typhoid and gamma gobulin.

And we want you to take these big, not hydroxychlorine, but chlorine.

So they gave me the shot and it wasn't disposable in those days.

It looked like the size of my forearm.

And they put about all these, and it was smallpox.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, I thought, you know, I was a strapping young guy, 19 years old, and I was saying, I'm going to go out on a Friday night with my friend.

I got to my bedroom and I just collapsed.

And I slept there for five days with a fever and I was wiped wiped out.

And then I went to Egypt and I took these things.

They look like horse pills.

Right.

Not hydroxychloroquine, but chloroquine.

Right.

And I got sick as a dog.

So my point is that that's what we're getting back to, that we're all invulnerable.

We're all these things.

We know everything about them and we're going to inject, check, check.

And we're all in anybody who says, you know, I got COVID for a week.

I fought it for four weeks.

I had long COVID.

I have antibodies.

I'm not getting another vax.

I have more immunity than you do.

Then we call them an anti-vaxxer and you're an enemy of the people.

And then, you know what, to punish you, we're going to make you get flu shots too.

Why would you see Berkeley say that at a time when there's mass resistance to mandatory COVID?

They say, you know what, screw you.

We're going to double down and we've never done it before, but this is the perfect time to require flu vaccination.

Well, again, when you're a bureaucrat and you can do it, there's got to be some deep psychological thrill to power to

get these things.

I mean, I don't know why these people are not sensitive to average people.

I mean, the average person you meet over 50, you talk to them and they'll say, I take insulin or I take heart medicine or I take Lipitor or I

have MS.

They all have problems.

So why would you just say, we don't want to hear about it.

You're going to get this.

And we have no scientific knowledge to what degree this is going to cause a side effect.

You know what?

We don't even care if you've had COVID.

And it's especially with people you met and you know, and I know some that have had COVID and they went through hell.

I know that we say it's a minor disease, but in 1 or 2%,

it's not.

And maybe 5%, there's long-term COVID with your immune system, for some apparent reason, doesn't completely shut off.

It keeps pumping, you know, anti-infectious.

you know, ikeotones and leucatrines and all histamines and all this stuff.

And when you talk to these people who finally shake that stuff, they feel like they should have a badge of honor, that they've got immunity now.

And the science suggests that maybe they do.

And maybe the immunity in some cases is better than artificially acquired through vaccinations.

But just to miss them as nuts or enemies, it's sick.

Well, it is sick.

And we'll let that be the last word, Victor, but for a few notes here.

So

again, as we always do, we would encourage our listeners to visit your website, victorhanson.com, and consider subscribing to access the voluminous, exclusive content that you put up on the website every week, practically every day.

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Also on the website, there's a link to subscribe to the week in review.

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If you haven't purchased the book yet, do consider that.

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As for me, I'd greatly appreciate it if our listeners would consider subscribing to Civil Thoughts, which I write.

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You'll find that at civilthoughts.com.

And if you're interested in what American Philanthropic does to strengthen civil society, do visit a centerforcivilsociety.com.

Also, I'd like to put in a good word for Victor has some friends at Facebook, the Victor Davis Hansen Club.

It's a nice group of folks there.

They put up whatever links they can find about things, Victor, that you are doing or actually things you have done.

One last thing for those that listen to this podcast on iTunes, please consider leaving a five-star review for Victor there.

Disregard the host, but the star of the show gets five stars.

And we do read the comments that some people leave.

Here's one called Truth and or Consequences by GetUnit.

And he wrote just the other day, Dr.

Hansen is a calm voice of reason.

in the shouting match of misdirected passion.

His thoughtful insights and demeanor of presentation help guide listeners to a place of confidence and reverence for the multitude of American patriots that sacrificed for the idea of America.

Choices have consequences.

And then one other, Romans 213, which I'm sorry, I don't know that verse.

I'm Catholic.

I don't read the Bible.

Title, VDH for National Historian.

Dr.

Hansen is the nation's historian with the ability to explain ancient society's actions and failures while connecting to modern-day society, proving that human nature does not change.

Thanks, Romans 2.1.3.

Thanks, GetUnit, and thanks everyone else who's left a comment or who has left a rating.

It's greatly appreciated.

There are two other shows under the Victor Davis-Hansen Show umbrella.

I have the great honor to do this, the traditionalist and the classicist.

And then the great Sammy Wink does the culturalist.

Please try to listen to all.

So that's about all the time we have.

Victor, it's it's great to have been able to talk to you again after a couple of weeks.

Congratulations on the initial success.

And I'm sure it will be prolonged success for the dying citizen, number seven on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week out and doing very well on other platforms, including Amazon, which maybe it will figure out its job of selling books to people who are trying to order them and purchase them.

So that's that.

And we will be back again in a few days with another episode of the Victor Hansen Show, The Traditionalists.

I'm Jack Bowler.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

I very much appreciate it.

And see you next time.

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